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Journal of Art Historiography Number 13 December 2015

‘What I wanted was concepts’: Michael Baxandall’s intellectual

Odyssey

Michael Baxandall, Vision and the Work of Words, edited by Peter Mack and

Robert Williams, Farnham UK and Burlington VT, Ashgate, 2015, xii +175 pp,

16 col. Plates, £ 60 hdbk, ISBN 9781472442789.

Robert W. Gaston

The elegantly concise introduction to this volume (1-8), subtitled “Of Tact and Moral

Urgency”, is indicative of the editors’ proclivity to offer a prefatory piece that at once

goes to the heart of two distinctive aspects of Baxandall’s meditations on ‘method’,

and subtly imitates his terse prose style. Their selection of a text from Baxandall

consisting of but ten words signifies their desire to adopt a critical stance that reveals

their own immersion in the problematics that arise in this author, perhaps the most

seductive yet unknowable art historian of his generation. They write:

A striking and much-remarked moment in Michael Baxandall’s work is

found at the very end of the chapter on Chardin’s Lady Taking Tea in Patterns

of Intention. There, having analyzed the picture so exactingly in relation to

eighteenth-century optical theory, he pauses to say of the woman depicted

that she is ‘probably Chardin’s first wife a few weeks before her death’. The

effect of this abrupt aside is complex. On the one hand, it signals a potential

aspect of the picture’s interest that Baxandall himself has chosen not to

pursue; it draws attention to the limited, circumscribed nature of the

argument he is making. By treating such personal information almost as if it

were an afterthought, moreover, he seems to be challenging us, daring us, to

think him so preoccupied with his preferred mode of analysis, so callous, that

he has forgotten about the human content of the image. At the same time, it

feels as though he is scolding us for our prurience, our misplaced curiosity. Is

his purpose thus to dismiss a clumsy kind of art-historical contextualism, a

vulgar social history of art? Or is he confessing to his own inadequacy, a lack

of psychological and emotional sensitivity sufficient to deal with those

aspects of the picture in an appropriate way? Perhaps, he is saying, pictures

deserve a measure of privacy.

The passage is a brilliant contemplation of a putative reader’s experience, one

tinged with the uncertainty triggered by Baxandall’s comment. In writing that ‘it

feels as though’ Baxandall may be ‘challenging us, daring us’ or ‘scolding us’ for

‘our prurience, our misplaced curiosity’, or ‘confessing his own inadequacy, a lack of

psychological and emotional sensitivity sufficient to deal with those aspects of the

picture in an appropriate way’, the editors prepare the reader for a collection of

studies that will be unusually intrusive, in the context of the existing corpus of art

historiography. They are asking the reader to consider whether Baxandall’s

published, unpublished, and posthumous works, and the art historical method that

Robert W. Gaston ‘What I wanted was concepts’:

Michael Baxandall’s intellectual Odyssey

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the contemporary theorist might expectantly seek to discover in them, are really as

accessible as one might assume.

One is moved to ask, what is it about Baxandall’s work that is so elusive, and

that elicits an approach that one normally finds devoted to the critical biographies of

purely literary authors rather than art historians? One sliver of the answer resides in

the fact that five of the contributors to the volume (Elizabeth Cook, Evelyn Lincoln,

Jules Lubbock, Peter Mack, and Alex Potts) were students of Baxandall either at the

Warburg Institute or at Berkeley, and therefore lived that exchange between student

and teacher which sometimes affords personal insights otherwise unretrievable. An

equally substantive explanation lies in the book’s title’s phrase, ‘Vision and the

Work of Words’. The collection makes clear the necessity of inquiry into the totality

of Baxandall’s writing, as novelist, memoirist, essayist, art history book author, and

perhaps most significantly, theorist and practitioner of the problematic relation of

words and pictures embodied in what he preferred to call ‘art criticism’. Yet the

assertion that Baxandall’s literary strategies in analyzing visual phenomena might

appear puzzling even to (or especially to) a reader immersed in professional art

history, warns the reader, in a curious application of captatio benevolentiae, that

he/she is going to require unusual effort to winkle Baxandall out of his shell.

The question posed, how does Baxandall suggest he should ‘deal with’ aspects

of a picture ‘in an appropriate way’, and that perhaps, in his comment on Chardin’s

Lady he was saying that ‘pictures deserve a measure of privacy’, are calculated to

suggest that a profoundly personal conception of methodological decorum was at

work in Baxandall’s writing. That the editors explicate this idea of decorum in the

introduction, expressed in Baxandall’s terms ‘tact’ and ‘restraint’, together with his

related concept of ‘moral urgency’, allows them to retrieve vital evidence from its

relatively inaccessible place (for the general reader) in Baxandall’s later oral

recollections in interview situations.1 The Patterns of Intention passage, and another

from Shadows and Enlightenment, both produce, for the editors, ‘an effect’ in the

reader, when Baxandall ‘stops to acknowledge something of all that he has left out’.

They explain:

The effect is to point up the highly focused, even obsessive concentration of

his own inquiry, but also to indicate the potential scope and depth of the

issue he has raised, the richness of its implications for future study. For his

own part, he will not presume to decide for the viewer what the

metaphysical expressivity of the shadow language at work in Chardin’s still-

lifes may be. People who look at pictures also deserve a measure of privacy.

1 Among these are ‘Substance, Sensation, and Perception: Michael Baxandall interviewed by

Richard Cándida Smith’, Getty Research Institute 1998

(http://archives.getty.edu:30008/getty_images/digitalresources/spcoll/gr940109_

baxandall_transcript.pdf); Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘Interview with Michael Baxandall’, Res, 2

(2008): 42-54; Alan Langdale, ‘Interview with Michael Baxandall’, Journal of Art

Historiography, 2009 (http://arthistoriography.wordpress.com/number-1-december-2009/1-

AL/1



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If both pictures and people who look at pictures deserve ‘privacy’ what exactly

does Baxandall offer his reader, or expect the reader to discover? The editors find it

essential to explain first that Baxandall’s concept of ‘tact’ determines what most

historiographers, but not Baxandall himself, would describe as his ‘methodology’:

In one of the interviews he gave toward the end of his career, he insisted that

‘tact’ is more important than ‘method’. Although his attitude is sometimes

thought to imply a rejection of method, it should rather be understood to

involve a recognition of the need for sensitivity to the built-in limitations of

our various analytical procedures, of language, and of our faculties in

general. Since his entire approach to the study of art was governed by this

idea and by the constraints it imposes on the kinds of claims we might

legitimately make, it could be regarded as itself a methodological principle.

Yet it might also be understood to involve something more than constraint:

an active element indicated more clearly by the word ‘tactical’. His teacher,

F.R. Leavis suggested such an idea when he declared that ‘the problem of

critical method is largely tactical’. Baxandall’s emphasis on tact testifies to a

sense of critical practice having to be governed by a self-regulating order or

protocol of some kind, structured by an inherent decorum. His lifelong

project could be described as an effort to fashion the best possible mode of

engagement with art: the most comprehensive, penetrating, and empirically

rigorous, but also the most flexible and receptive to what may always elude

our conceptual and linguistic equipment.

This is an admirably succinct statement of Baxandall’s mature method. Concealed

here is the editors’ process of investigation of scattered gleanings palimpsested in

this lucid summary. On the face of it, Baxandall outlined his approach more clearly

and revealingly in the interviews conducted late in his life than he ever did in his

publications.

The editors (2) describe the ‘unlikely’ nature of his ‘professional iter’:

Trained in classics at school and in English at Cambridge, he spent a couple

of years on the Continent, in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, originally

intending to write a novel but slowly drifting into the serious study of

Renaissance history and art. After working in the Photographic Collection of

the Warburg Institute and the Sculpture Department of the Victoria and

Albert Museum, he was appointed in 1965 to lecture at the Warburg, not on

art history but on rhetoric and dialectic.

The phrase ‘slowly drifting into’ captures the tone of Baxandall’s own terminology

from his interviews in which he describes his haphazard, almost accidental passage

to a teaching position at the Warburg. That favoured recent term from biography

and intellectual history, ‘trajectory’, seems to have no relevance in Baxandall’s case.

Far from being an art history major destined for postgraduate grooming, the Ph.D.

and the usual patronage route into a university teaching position within the one



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discipline, Baxandall was inclined to describe his mental life at university and in the

couple of years after as something akin to ‘messing about in boats’.2

Mack and Williams give (2) a concise account of the relation of Baxandall’s

research and writing at the Warburg from 1965 to the publication of his first two

books:

He began a dissertation under the supervision of E.H. Gombrich but did not

finish it, though his research provided him with material for several

important articles as well as his first two books. Giotto and the Orators (1971)

examined the relationship between Renaissance pictures and the conventions

of humanist Latin while demonstrating the necessity of attentiveness to

language in any self-conscious approach to visual art. The suggestive and

highly influential Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972), still

his most widely read book, considers the ways in which pictures are

informed by the visual, conceptual, and linguistic skills of the people by and

for whom they were made.

Baxandall’s non-completion of his dissertation would probably have rendered

him unemployable in an American university. In the 1960s many leading scholars in

the humanities in England held M.A. degrees, some of which (including Baxandall’s)

had not required a postgraduate thesis, and the group of Austrian and German

scholars in art history who resided at the Warburg, most of them refugees from

Hitler in the 1930s, were unusual in possessing the doctoral degree in art history.

The American universities had adopted the German model much earlier.3 Baxandall

had graduated from Cambridge with an upper-second degree in English and not the

coveted ‘first’, a stigma that could have eliminated entry to postgraduate research

degrees and curatorial positions such as he took up at the Victoria and Albert and

the Warburg. The absence of rigidity in the British systems, and his good fortune in

encountering Gertrud Bing, allowed Baxandall to demonstrate the requisite

intellectual gifts. His ‘several important articles’ of the 1960s were published in the

Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,(JWCI) which began in 1938 as the

Journal of the Warburg Institute, with the mission statement devised by Edgar Wind

and Rudolf Wittkower: ‘…the Journal takes for its province the study of Humanism

in its widest sense. It seeks to explore the working of symbols – the signs and images

created by ancient, and employed by modern generations, as instruments both of

enlightenment and of superstition.’ Number 4, April 1938, ‘a selection of essays

written in honour of Fritz Saxl by his friends in London’ included contributions from

English scholars, including Anthony Blunt. The editors added a monitory note: ‘As it

does not come within the scope of this Journal to publish studies devoted primarily

to questions of attribution or style, the editors have been forced to omit a number of

2 Kenneth Grahame, The Wind In the Willows [1933], Illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard, New

York, Charles Scribner’s Sons: 6. 3 See Craig Hugh Smyth and Peter Lukehart, The Early Years of Art History in the United States:

Notes and Essays on Departments, Teaching, and Scholars, Princeton, Princeton University Press,

1993.



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essays which, in view of their interest, it would have been an honour to include.’

Rhetoric, Baxandall’s initial field at the Warburg, already found its place in Delio

Cantimori’s essay in issue 2 of that year, ‘Rhetoric and Politics in Italian Humanism’,

but style was seen to belong in The Burlington Magazine, designed for connoisseurs.

The JWCI was never to change its mission and its exclusions. Gombrich, however,

was publishing elsewhere analytical studies on concepts of style as early as in The

Story of Art (1950), Art and Illusion (1960) and his essay ‘Style’ appeared in the

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences in 1968, when Baxandall was shaping

his JWCI material for Giotto and the Orators. Otto Kurz had published his catalogue of

17th and 18th century Baroque drawings in the Royal collections in 1955. And so on,

for some other members of the Warburg group. I mention these facts to sharpen our

understanding of Baxandall’s situation when he arrived at the Warburg and started

working on rhetoric, humanism, art history and social history, while contemplating

‘style’.

The sub-title to Baxandall’s Painting and Experience was ‘A Primer in the Social

History of Pictorial Style’. Baxandall explicates the ‘Style’ element at 38-40. Three

framing sentences indicate his approach ‘We have been moving towards a notion of

a Quattrocento cognitive style. By this one would mean the equipment that the

fifteenth-century painter’s public brought to complex visual stimulations like

pictures.…We are concerned here with Quattrocento cognitive style as it relates to

Quattrocento pictorial style’. The radically new aspect of ‘cognitive style’ was

evident to all of us in 1972. The word ‘primer’, something less noted, was

intentionally provocative, and its rhetorical impact can easily be overlooked.

‘Primer’, in Anglo-American usage, denotes (in Webster’s New International

Dictionary of 1920 entry, for example: II, 1705) “A small elementary book for teaching

children to read; a reading or spelling book for a beginner; hence, any small book of

elementary principles of a subject.’ A scholar of rhetoric, Baxandall maintained the

lapidary deliberative style throughout the book, expounding his new arguments

about style in simple, often axiomatic sentences. The book was developed from

lectures he delivered to history students. He states in the preface that:

The lectures were meant to show how the style of pictures is a proper

material of social history. Social facts, I argued, lead to the development of

distinctive visual skills and habits: and these…become identifiable elements

in the painter’s style. With some complications the same argument underlies

this book. It is therefore addressed to people with a general historical

curiosity about the Renaissance rather than to people interested just in

Renaissance painting, who might well find it insensitive and flighty by turns.

This is not a way of saying I think it vacuous as art history.

The complex locutions here were, as we know from interviews, designed to

irritate people who practiced the ‘Courtauld’ approach to art history. By

characterizing his audience as ‘general’ and ‘curious’ Baxandall appeared to align

himself with Gombrich, and with visual art seen in relation to cultural and

intellectual history. Yet his sub-title contrasted pointedly with Gombrich’s heavily

weighted one for Art and Illusion: ‘A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial



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Representation’, while touching on similar dimensions of the ‘cognitive’ practices of

both artists and beholders. Baxandall’s throwaway line ‘This is not a way of saying I

think it vacuous as art history’ was as much a challenge to Warburg traditions of

image-analysis (Panofsky, Wittkower and Wind) as it was to the particular

Courtauld scholars whose work he did not find interesting. In Gombrich’s Art and

Illusion, a book that Baxandall repeatedly describes as having stimulated discussion

with Gombrich and younger friends, one can detect a corresponding, tetchy

direction to the general reader: ‘…it should be clear by now that this is not a picture

book with explanatory letterpress. It is reading matter with explanatory pictures.’

Rhetorical antithesis was brandished here to prepare the reader for serious

theoretical stuff, while Baxandall disingenuously claimed to be offering an

undergraduate ABC ‘with some complications’. So when Michael Ann Holly

describes Painting and Experience as a ‘textbook’, she is correct, in the definitional

sense given above.4 But if she were saying that she views it in qualitative contrast

with Baxandall’s later, more ‘purely theoretical’(my terms) books, I think that would

open a discussion regarding the survival of ‘positivist’ components in Baxandall’s

work as a whole.

To return to the editors’ introduction, (3) Baxandall’s Limewood Sculptors (1980)

is said to attempt ‘a more ambitiously comprehensive and systematic historical

contextualization, examining everything from the cellular structure of limewood to

the dynamics of commerce to the relation between religion and emergent humanism.

As in Painting and Experience, the author quarried a refreshingly varied array of

primary sources while also structuring the argument in such a way as to offer a

methodological model.’ The book is thus said to offer the very model that Baxandall

was to claim later he had no intention of ever delivering. In this book he certainly

exposed every raw analytical nerve, opening up the problematics of ‘verbalizing’

persuasively about a personal style (123), stating that ‘There is no question of fully

possessing oneself of another culture’s cognitive style’, despite the attempt being

worthwhile. If anything, the ‘period eye’ section in this book (143-63) is more

sharply focused but less self-convinced in its exposition. The editors then describe

how when in 1986 Baxandall took up his dual chairs at Berkeley and the Warburg he

had shortly before (1985) published Patterns of Intention with its chapters on Picasso,

Chardin, and Piero della Francesca, which testified to ‘a growing range of interests

as well as a more rigorous and finely tuned interrogation of analytical language and

procedure’. The preface to this book definitely signalled a change of analytical

approach, and in the direction of philosophy (v):

The lectures [of which the book is a revised version] addressed a question: If

we offer a statement about the causes of a picture, what is the nature and

basis of the statement? More particularly, if we think or speak of a picture as,

among other things, a product of situated volition or intention, what is it that

we are doing? So the question is, within limits, one about the historical

explanation of pictures, though I more often speak of ‘inferential criticism’ of

4 Michael Ann Holly, ‘Patterns in the Shadows: Attention in/to the writings of Michael

Baxandall’, in Adrian Rifkin, ed., About Michael Baxandall, Oxford and Malden MA, 1999, 5-16



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pictures because this corresponds better with the balance of my interest in the

activity.

Characteristically, Baxandall positioned himself as an amateur in this

analytical field where description and explanation interact, commenting (1): ‘I shall

limit myself to pointing – with a quite shaky finger, since this is intricate ground

beyond my competence – to three kinds of problem explanatory art criticism seems

to meet.’ The two later books, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence, written with

Svetlana Alpers (1994), and Shadows and Enlightenment (1995), mark a concentration

on eighteenth-century topics. As the editors say, ‘The first addresses the practical

challenge of large-scale decorative painting, the second, the relation between the

intimate work of artists like Chardin and the optical theory both of their time and

ours.’ The editors then turn to Baxandall’s plan to write a dissertation on the

principle of ‘restraint’ in Renaissance culture, noting that his interest in the topic had

developed ‘early on’. They remark perceptively (3): ‘His attraction to the principle as

an object of historical inquiry thus overlay his sense of its importance to any mode of

historical inquiry’. This allows them to assemble statements from Patterns of Intention

and the interviews regarding Baxandall’s insistence that art criticism should merely

‘establish a platform from which people can do the last stage themselves’, applying

‘tact’, ‘good manners’, and an approach that is both ‘scientific’ and ‘sociable’. They

see in his work ‘a fastidiousness that sometimes irritated even his admirers, a refusal

either to rush heedlessly into unsustainable conjecture or to bully readers into

accepting apodictic assertions’. Perhaps his most succinct version of this (3) is: ‘I

don’t like art criticism which spells out directly what the narrative feelings of a

picture are’. In Limewood Sculptors (153) he had identified this ‘disposition to infer

character and feeling from a representation of a human figure’ as a ‘strong and

deep…constant in the older European art criticism’ that had to be resisted. The

editors then turn to Baxandall’s notion of ‘moral urgency’, a phenomenon he

observed in the teaching of F.R. Leavis at Cambridge. They comment (4):

Apparently antithetical as they may seem, tact and moral urgency should not

be understood as opposed to one another but as two aspects of the same

fundamental principle, two sides of the same coin: an expression of human

sensitivity, tact is a sign of alertness to the dynamic of human concerns that

ground and motivate our interest in art in the first place, and is thus a direct

expression of what is most pressingly at stake in it.

Mack and Williams identify two places in Baxandall’s work where moral

urgency ‘occasionally’ makes itself strikingly felt, one in his account of Piero della

Francesca’s Resurrection in Words for Pictures (2003) and another from his

posthumously published autobiographical sketch, Episodes (2010). Such instances,

though telling, seem not to be plentiful. The editors wisely comment (6) that

Baxandall’s ‘outright resistance to many trends that went on to become fashionable’

is ‘part of what makes him interesting and possibly more important than we can

now clearly assess’. In fact, the late interviews are almost a comedy of rejections,

where interviewers project upon him a presumed series of obligatory (chiefly



8

French) intellectual influences, only to have them demolished in series. One of the

‘rejects’ edges back into in this volume, notably Wittgenstein. We need further study

of the origins of this Baxandallian diffidence towards new, but not self-generated

theory. I would relate it – beyond the fact of his propensity toward intellectual

solitude and originality – to the broader personal struggle many young people

educated by Oxbridge scholars at the time experienced, to free themselves gradually

and in distinctive ways from their positivist/empiricist training. In the 1970s many of

us were, then, like Baxandall, seeking to keep our heads above water in a tsunami of

theory, searching selectively through each new wave while still profiting from, but

interrogating, our empiricist roots, which bound us to investigate textual and

archival sources, and the historical terminology of past societies.

Alex Potts opens the collection with a sharp piece on ‘The Visual Conditions of

Pictorial Meaning’ (9-23), in which he explores the subtle variations in Baxandall’s

sequential accounts (between 1985 and 2003) of Piero’s Resurrection of Christ and

Baptism of Christ, Braque’s Violin and Pitcher, and Chardin’s Lady Taking Tea. He sets

this investigation against a ‘necessarily very speculative’ enquiry into how these

concerns about ‘the historical circumstances informing artistic practices’ might

‘relate to and differ from the preoccupations with problems of picturing that were

circulating in the contemporary art world at the time when his outlook on art and

writing about art was being formed in the 1950s and 1960s’. Potts justly notes that

Baxandall’s ‘later thoughts on painting are in their own way just as significant’ as his

earlier, and much studied, ‘exploration of the language of art-critical and art-

historical analysis’, of ‘sculptural aesthetics and the materiality of sculpture, or his

often misunderstood reflections on the notion of the period eye’. Potts (10) succinctly

describes Baxandall’s later theoretical focus:

At issue for him was a very basic question having to do with the nature of

pictorial depiction. How does attending closely to the internal processes and

subtleties of a painterly depiction prompt one to see something in a painting

– whether meaning or affect or some sense of a larger culture – that is not

literally there? This in part has to do with very basic processes of seeing a

motif or scenario emerge from the forms created by the marks on the surface

of a painting. However, it is much more than the mere recognition of what is

being depicted. It involves apprehending in the minutiae of the picturing

something that brings the depicted motif to life and gives it its larger

meaning.

Baxandall (10) arrived at a position on ‘the distinctive kind of looking that

painting invites’ that led him, towards the end of his life, to express stronger interest

in ‘inattention and what is happening outside of attention’, in peripheral vision and

what happens for the viewer ‘when one’s attention wanders’. Potts argues (11) that

Baxandall’s ultimate account of ‘pictorial meaning’ and ‘[t]he process whereby

significant meaning gets into the painting…has little to do with conventional

iconographic or representational subtleties, the nuts and bolts of the hermeneutic

interpretation that have dominated art historical analysis’. Baxandall’s approach,

Potts suggests, entailed a ‘reciprocal hypothesis that the same holds for the painter,



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whose work gains in resonance through his or her focus on the technicalities of

picture making, technicalities whose relation to any larger meaning might seem at

first sight to be incidental or even inconsequential’. These ‘technical-seeming

concerns’ were preoccupying Baxandall in the 1950s and early 1960s, when he and

Michael Podro encountered Gombrich’s ‘systematic rethinking of pictorial

representation’, with its ‘close engagement with recent scientific studies of visual

cognition and perception’, only to embrace Richard Wollheim’s critique of

Gombrich, in search of a theory able to account for ‘the more complex and resonant

aspects of pictorial depiction’. Potts thoughtfully considers (12) whether the

‘intensive preoccupation with painting and painterly process’ in contemporary art

can be usefully related to Baxandall’s ‘distinctive concerns’. He examines Dubuffet’s

practice of ‘painterly mark-making’ and his interest in inattentiveness, (12-13) but is

cautious about claiming any direct influence. He builds (14) a tentative bridge to

Dubuffet’s figurative paintings via an essay on the sculpture of George Baselitz

Baxandall wrote in 2004, but finds firmer terrain in his fascination with works of

Braque and Picasso, in Patterns of Intention. Here (15) ‘the painter’s complex problem

of good picture-making becomes a serial and continually self-redefining operation,

permanent problem-reformulation, as soon as he enters the process of actually

painting’. This sentence would serve as a description of Baxandall’s own continuous

processes of analytical self-definition throughout his career. Potts shows how

Baxandall returns to Braque in his late article ‘Fixation and Distraction: The Nail in

Braque’s Violin and Pitcher’, as he began to free himself from ‘a concern to clarify

issues of art-historical methodology’, focusing now (17) on how the painting elicits

awareness ‘of an interplay between focal and peripheral viewing, between fine and

coarse registration’, engaging in what Baxandall calls ‘the visual representation of

visual knowledge, and that is a sign not transparent through to some paraphraseable

semantic object somehow inside.’

In the final part of his study Potts takes (17-19) Baxandall’s 2003 article on

Piero’s Resurrection of Christ as a ‘particularly fine instance’ of Baxandall’s ‘more

densely articulated discussions of issues of picture making and pictorial depiction’.

The Resurrection is a picture, one might venture, already recognized within the

discipline as unique within its iconographic category, and Baxandall rightly

concentrated on its ‘visual particularities and apparent awkwardnesses’, which, as

Potts writes, ‘he then envisages as making visually present, in a very indirect way,

certain larger Christian thematics of resurrection which would have had a powerful

resonance in the painter’s immediate cultural environment’. Rather than rehearsing

Potts’s selective summary of Baxandall’s argument, it suffices to give Baxandall’s

own concise comment, which he quotes (18): ‘It would be a pity to reduce this

pictorial universe, reverberating in sympathy with the Resurrection of Christ, to a

level of questions about whether or not, yes or no, this particular thing stood for

that’. A crucial facet, however, of Baxandall’s argument in this essay derives from a

singularly important piece he published in 1993: ‘Pictorially Enforced Signification:

St Antoninus, Fra Angelico and the Annunciation’, in Hülle und Fülle: Festschrift für

Tilman Buddensieg, Cologne 1993: 31-399: cited Baxandall 2003, 122, note 6). In the

2003 essay he argues that ‘A sort of divergence between pictorial rendering of

something and verbal rendering of the same thing is inherent in the instruments



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each employs. One way of thinking about this divergence is as picture and verbal

text each being committed to a medium that enforces different systems of

discrimination’. In his 2003 study Baxandall himself undertakes to address the

traditional art historical techniques of image analysis in relation to Piero’s painting,

notably iconography, only to dismiss much of its relevance to his inquiry. He also

feels the need to account for San Sepolcro’s specific civic and religious ambience,

much as any art historian influenced by recent social and political history would do.

These forays into ‘ordinary’ art history serve to differentiate Baxandall’s own

approach. But his path through to a personal apprehension of the image is less freely

executed in Piero’s case than in many of his other studies. He found it harder to

divest himself of the usual question-sets of the discipline in dealing with this

spectacularly original painting from the Quattrocento. Potts interprets this in

reverse: ‘In his later analysis of Piero’s Resurrection, he had moved beyond the

somewhat self-denying ordinance he had set himself earlier [in 1985] of refusing any

assigning of cultural or social historical meaning to the work’. Potts observes, in this

respect, that Baxandall’s account of Piero’s Baptism of Christ in Patterns of Intention,

while adopting ‘a somewhat similar approach’ to the 2003 essay on the Resurrection,

‘does not have the same resonance…in part because he was constrained by the

somewhat didactic agenda of the book in which the critical analysis was

incorporated’. Potts substantiates this point, beyond question. Yet one suspects that

these fluctuations in Baxandall’s investigative methods, which he now disposed of,

then re-addressed to varying degrees, signify a troubled relationship with not just

the hermeneutic habits of Renaissance art history, but with the process of finding a

single voice for himself. This is cleverly summarized by Potts near the close of his

essay (20):

Baxandall’s way of engaging in detailed critical analysis of paintings might

be characterized as acrobatic deadpanness. There is a strategic indirectness,

with comments about larger meanings presented as tangential afterthoughts,

but which then, nevertheless, seem to resonate retrospectively in his

punctiliously deliberate analysis of pictorial detail and his matter of fact

narration of the cultural realities that might have been at play in a the

conception of a work.

Jules Lubbock’s chapter (25-47) is entitled: ‘To Do a Leavis on Visual Art’: The

Place of F.R. Leavis in Michael Baxandall’s Intellectual Formation’. Lubbock’s first

paragraph addresses the point I raised above. In his late 1960s teaching Baxandall

counselled his students to avoid anachronism in estimating how fifteenth-century

spectators would have ‘articulated their responses to a work of art’, while regarding

their critical terms ‘to be in many ways inadequate’:

Nor did he consider it desirable, let alone possible, to respond only as a

beholder contemporary to the work of art would have done. Nevertheless,

much of his career was devoted to the study and teaching of what he called

‘art and its circumstances’, and even if he did not consider that a grasp of the



11

latter was a sufficient condition for understanding of the former, he did

regard it as a necessary one.

Lubbock utilizes Baxandall’s papers in the Department of Manuscripts at

Cambridge University Library to study his activities ‘from his Cambridge years up

to the early 1970s, and upon a single topic, namely his enduring admiration for

Leavis and how his ambition “to do a Leavis on visual art” manifested itself’.

Lubbock shows (26) that Baxandall, while studying English literature with Leavis at

Downing College, was drawn into his ‘practical criticism’ classes, four sessions per

week of ‘close reading’ and the transmission to students of ‘a set of values’ that were

‘established in exemplary pieces of literature … read in his way’. Baxandall did,

however, yearn for something Leavis would not deliver, ‘an explicit method with

precepts and procédés’, a ‘sort of neat driver’s manual’. Baxandall composed for

himself an ‘illegitimate’ glossary of four ‘key terms’ extracted from Leavis’s teaching

(Standards, Moral Judgements, Art and Morality, Impersonality: texts in Lubbock,

Appendix, 38-40). Lubbock examines ‘Standards’. For Leavis, Baxandall noted,

standards were ‘complex and interdependent upon other concepts and activities

denoted by other key terms…A poem doesn’t exist in the same way as a physical

object. It only exists once it has been ‘established’ …in the minds of its readers. This

is ‘to be accomplished through the exercise of ‘literary criticism’, whereby the

experience of the poem is recreated in the minds of readers and shared through

collaborative discussion. This in turn depends upon an intelligent ‘reading public’.

And so on. Lubbock infers that Baxandall’s ‘disinterring and understanding the key

terms of Renaissance art criticism and theory’, including those of Alberti, was

inspired by Leavis’s ‘standards and procedures’. Baxandall discovered it was not

possible to ‘act out’ the text and the author in analyzing visual art, however he

explored Leavis’s approach to ‘characteristic movements and dictions of the

eighteenth century’, to ‘social deportment and company manners’, suggesting that

‘literature is embedded in its ‘milieu’ through diction and social mores’.

Lubbock documents Baxandall’s early reading of Burckhardt’s Civilization of

the Renaissance in Italy, and parts of Wölfflin’s Classic Art. When he enrolled for

external BA at the Courtauld in 1955, Baxandall spent time at the Collegio Borromeo

in Pavia, taught English in Switzerland and began to study art history in Munich.

Lubbock quotes (29) from Baxandall’s recollections of Pavia to show that he was

contemplating as early as 1955-56 that conceptualizing about visual art was

necessary, but that implied grasping the period’s own concepts. There were

questions to raise about ‘the historical frame’. He found a worthy teacher in Munich

in Ludwig Heydenreich, who set him working on ‘the use of source material for the

study of the Ducal Palace in Urbino’. From Baxandall’s fragmentary papers,

Lubbock reconstructs (30) his approach to the patron’s biography, vivid architectural

description, and his conviction that one should express ‘energy’ in ‘your response to

a work.’ Lubbock argues (31-2) that Baxandall’s idea of ‘doing a Leavis on visual art’

persisted ‘throughout his career. He traces this, using Baxandall’s unstudied papers

from Munich and, more importantly, his 60 page draft for the unfinished Ph.D.

thesis. Here there is a piece on ‘Decorum in Alberti’ which Bing had commented on.

Lubbock notes: ‘Baxandall is highly critical of Alberti’s framework of architectural



12

theory and criticism, which he considers “to have been too tidy and inflexible” to do

justice to the complexities both of the experience of architecture and the job of

designing a building’. In a handwritten note Baxandall comments: ‘The very clarity

of the system seems to give it a certain unreality’. Lubbock brings out significant

new details, observing (33) Baxandall’s ‘hostility to the “driving manual” and his

admiration for writing [in rare vernacular passages in Alberti] which is less

systematic and more spontaneous, more direct and enthusiastic, in a word, more

visceral’. A personal letter to Lubbock from 1970 affords further support:

‘…Alberti…inhibited people through the difficulty of his equipment…’. Lubbock

shows (34) that by the time Giotto and the Orators was published (1971) Baxandall

had ‘moved beyond his crudely polarized admiration for the [Italian] vernacular and

condemnation of revived latinity’ of his draft on Alberti and Decorum. The

manuscripts open a window ‘to penetrate the poised scholarly style of the published

work to his personal hostility to some aspects of the language of art criticism and

history, both Renaissance and modern’.

Lubbock argues that Painting and Experience (1972), viewed through the

unpublished writings, had the ‘ambition…to provide an answer to the problems of

neo-classical art criticism aired in Giotto and the Orators’. Baxandall’s discovery of

dancing as one of his ‘vernacular visual skills’ appears first in a typescript from the

early 1960s (35), annotated by Bing. Lubbock describes Baxandall’s ‘identification’ of

dancing’s relevance as ‘an imaginative leap, whose precise trajectory I have not been

able to reconstruct’: ‘It may have been the serendipity of the Warburg Library, where

dance is located on the shelves close to cookery, household management, festivals,

and the conduct of courtly life, where he may have been looking for material on

decorum’. Lubbock makes two additional points: ‘dance provided [Baxandall] with

trace evidence of key terms in the Italian language, in the vernacular, which Galli

and others were applying in their discussion of the visual arts….I think dancing,

more than the other vernacular visual skills…provided Baxandall with the kind of

shortcut between social life and the visual arts that he found in Leavis, and which he

considered to be less problematic for literary than for art criticism’. Lubbock’s is a

richly documented exploration of the unpublished papers, and his notes also merit

close reading.

Alberto Frigo’s chapter is entitled ‘Baxandall and Gramsci: Pictorial

Intelligence and organic Intellectuals’ (49-68) The author takes up the challenge

posed by Gramsci’s absence from Baxandall’s art historical publications, save one

mention in an endnote to Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence. His sources (49-51) will

be Baxandall’s late interviews, his Episodes, and A Grasp of Kaspar, his posthumously

published novel, where in all three the Italian socialist intellectual (1860-1937) is

given not just heroic status, but is acknowledged as an author deeply embedded in,

or bound into his own consciousness throughout his academic career. Frigo

documents how Baxandall discovered Gramcsci’s work at Pavia in 1955-56 (the

Prison Notebooks had been published 1948-1951), isolating particularly Gramsci’s

notion of ‘common sense’ as the focus of his attachment. Frigo analyzes Gramsci’s

diverse and flexible range of meanings for his concept (52-4), noting inter alia that for

him it was ‘the philosophy of non-philosophers’, a phenomenon different from the

Zeitgeist or ‘the Volk[s]geist of German Idealism’, something ‘continually



13

transforming itself’, acting as ‘a base or a set of knowledge or skills that belong to a

single individual and that everyone can use, correct, or integrate’ (53). Gramsci’s

common sense ‘finds its primary mode of expression in language’ given that ‘Every

language contains the elements of a conception of the world and of a culture’. Frigo

argues (54-5) that one can detect Gramsci’s presence in Baxandall’s earliest books, if

one follows the trail of the common sense concept in its transmuted forms of ‘the

words were the system (Giotto and the Orators), ‘language and syntax [are] selective

sharpeners of attention’, the ‘integrity’ of the ‘historical cultures’ under examination,

and (in Patterns of Intention) his seeing ‘human cultures and human minds as

wholes’.

In an interview with Obrist published (after Baxandall’s death) in 2008,

Baxandall defended in Gramscian terms his concept of the period eye as presented

in Painting and Experience, where it had drawn criticism from Gombrich: ‘The period

eye is constituted by the skills of discrimination one acquires by living in a culture,

including perceiving the art in that culture, but it is totally different from zeitgeist

and has none of the theoretical substructure.’ Note 47 quotes Baxandall recalling to

Obrist that ‘I never persuaded Gombrich’ that the period eye concept was not ‘a

zeitgeist claim’, and here it would have been useful to note that Gombrich’s In Search

of Cultural History, (1969),5 had carefully explored the penetration of both Volksgeist

and Zeitgeist, emanating from Hegel and passing through Burckhardt’s The

Civilization (admired by Baxandall), where one meets with the (Baxandallian)

practice of gathering promising sources and excerpts. Gombrich (18) found

Burckhardt ‘impressive in ‘his economy in their use, and the magic touch with

which he turned these selected extracts into signs of the time’. Gombrich (21) also

notes Burckhardt’s ‘Hegelian optimism’ in his claim that ‘the Italian spirit turned

towards the discovery of the external world and its representation in language (my

emphasis) and in art’. Gombrich identified elements of the ‘Hegelian construct of

cultural history’ in Wölfflin’s Renaissance and Baroque, when he says: ’To explain a

style cannot mean anything but to fit its expressive character into the general history

of the period, to prove that its forms do not say anything in their language that is not

also said by the other organs of the age’, Gombrich stressed that Hegelian

metaphysics were not ‘accepted in all their abstruse ramifications by any of these

historians’, but that even Panofsky had ‘never renounced the desire to demonstrate

the organic unity of all aspects of a period, and in his Gothic Architecture and

Scholasticism had postulated a ‘mental habit’ acquired by the scholastics ‘and carried

over into architectural practice’. In his Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art …

he explicitly defended the notion of cultures having an essence…’. One can

understand why Gombrich, having just published this critique, was troubled by

Baxandall’s Painting and Experience, and it is not clear whether Baxandall defended

himself to his intellectual mentor in the early 1970s (as distinct from in the late

interviews) by referring to Gramsci’s denial that his concept of common sense

differed from Volksgeist and Zeitgeist. I do not suggest that Baxandall blundered into

a Hegelian methodology. Rather it might be profitable to pursue how Baxandall’s

period eye differed from several of the Hegelian and crypto-Hegelian formulations

5 E.H. Gombrich, In Search Of Cultural History, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1969



14

that Gombrich analyzed in those authors to whom Baxandall held an early

attraction. Frigo (56) offers some tantalizing leads, to show how Baxandall moved

away, in Gramcian mode, from his earlier conception of period eye, recognizing that

in Words for Pictures Baxandall invoked ‘Alberti’s cast of mind’ and suggests that ‘the

extraordinary De pictura was not just an outcome of the cultural moment’ but the

product of a ‘drive that imposed systematic order on painting’ that was personal and

‘eccentric’. In Giotto and the Orators ‘Alberti had been recognized as a spokesman of

the humanistic point of view on paintings, or rather, of “the authentically

humanistic, because periodic point of view’. In Words for Pictures ‘this humanistic

common sense, so to speak, is not enough to explain De pictura’.

Frigo devotes 57-9 to Gramsci’s distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘organic’

intellectuals, the latter ‘directing the ideas and aspirations of the class to which they

organically belong’, showing how Baxandall revealed to his interviewers Langdale

(1994) and Obrist his concept of the intellectual, and (59) ‘identifies painters as

intellectuals’: ‘I think of artists as Gramscian intellectuals’. Frigo devotes the

remainder of his study to ‘how Piero della Francesca, Picasso, Chardin, or Tiepolo

can be considered Gramscian intellectuals.’ ‘The first and most natural hypothesis’,

Frigo argues, ‘is connected with the idea that works of art are also historical

documents and that artists are witnesses to their culture’. So far so good, yet Frigo

has to do some fast footwork here. He opens his case with Baxandall’s suggestion in

Limewood Sculptors (vii) ‘that works of art can sometimes be “addressed as lenses

bearing on their circumstances”’. He continues, more tentatively: ‘Understood in

such terms, some artists seem to show traits that link them to the intellectuals

described by Gramsci (my emphasis). Thus ‘Great artists, Baxandall affirms more

than once, unite in a coherent and ordinate way the elements coming from a number

of heterogeneous circumstances imposed by the society and culture with which they

interact’. More assuredly, Frigo states: ‘Only very good works of art, the

performances of exceptionally organized men, Baxandall in fact’ writes in Limewood

Sculptors, ‘are complex and co-ordinated enough to register in their forms the kind of

cultural circumstances sought here; second rate art will be little use to us’. So for

Baxandall, artists –great artists – are intellectuals because they produce a synthesis

characterized by what Gramsci called ‘homogeneity’, ‘coherence’, and ‘logic’.

Avoiding the traditional art historical evaluative categories of “sensitivity, taste, or

originality’, Baxandall emphasizes these artists’ ‘high degree of organization’, a

quality that renders them Gramscian intellectuals. Frigo (60-62) makes a strong case

that Baxandall and Alpers, in Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence made a ‘rigorous

and …original application of the notion of organic intellectuals’, showing that

Tiepolo is a pictorial intellectual ‘because of how he paints, not what he paints’.

Overall, Frigo’s investigation is strongly justified and clearly demonstrated, and

culminates in a marvellous quote from the interview with Obrist about why

Baxandall felt ‘content to stay with Gramsci’.

I add here a note regarding what Baxandall says in Limewood Sculptors about

restricting the scope of his study to ‘very good works of art, the performances of

exceptionally organized men’. There is a tempting parallel that seems to have eluded

critical notice, between this decision and Edgar Wind’s comparably terse ‘An

observation on method’, concluding his Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958)



15

(236-38), an in-house Warburg book doubtless familiar to Baxandall.6 Wind’s

preoccupation with his fundamentally Warburgian mission to ‘penetrate the pagan

mysteries of the Renaissance’ (1) in both classical texts transmitted via humanist

scholarship and in selected images, was in no way commensurate with the tasks

Baxandall set himself. Yet, there may be a resonance, linguistic and attitudinal, in

Wind’s insistence that his reader must accommodate to ‘a certain ingredient of

deliberate paradox, which qualified the imitation of antiquity by Renaissance

humanists’ to avoid ‘misjudgi[ng] altogether the atmosphere in which the pagan

mysteries were revived’. ‘They were sponsored’, he wrote, ‘by men of letters who

had learned from Plato that the deepest things are best spoken of in a tone of irony’.

Wind admits, with calculated rhetorical intent, that ‘Serio ludere might also stand as a

motto over a chapter which I have not attempted to write, and the omission of which

may help to demonstrate the incompleteness of my observations on pagan

mysteries…’. In closing, Wind states the necessity of the historian (he does not say

art historian) concentrating on ‘the exceptional in history’. This is far from being a

Gramscian message, rather one about exegesis in iconology, but it asserts the

historian’s perceived obligation to balance research between the ‘commonplace’, a

‘relentless force’, and ‘the exceptional in history, the power of which should also

perhaps not be underrated’. He continues: ‘In a perfect study, both aspects should be

present; and it is one of the many weaknesses of this book that, except in one or two

cases, it does not show how an adventurous proposition sinks into a platitude, or

how genius is engulfed by complacency or inertia’. He goes on: ‘…inasmuch as we

are forced to select, it would seem that to choose the exceptional for study is, in the

long run, the lesser risk. An eminent iconographer who preferred the opposite

course discovered that “the symbolical creations of geniuses are unfortunately

harder to nail down to a definite subject than the allegorical inventions of minor

artists”. If this be so, there is something wrong with the manner of nailing down’. I

am simply intrigued as to whether the rhetorical tactics employed by Wind here,

tactical admissions that the method is imperfect and incompletely executed but

nevertheless justified although risk may still be present, and the insistence on the

more difficult path to ‘the exceptional’, may have had a delayed, albeit diverse,

impact on the young Baxandall in framing his work.

Whitney Davis contributes ‘Art History, Re-Enactment, and the Idiographic

Stance’, 69-89. He launches his piece with a telling reference to Maurice

Mandelbaum’s The Anatomy of Historical Knowledge (1977), with its distinction

between art history (along with the histories of literature and science) as a

‘semiautonomous special history’, and ‘general history’. Davis argues (69) that the

‘experience’ in Painting and Experience ‘belongs to the territory covered by

Mandelbaum’s general history’, whereas in Patterns of Intention ‘experience also

includes the art historian’s activity in experiencing (and “explaining”) pictures from

fifteenth-century Italy’. Davis’s target here is Baxandall’s notion of ‘re-enactment’

and its sources. In Patterns of Intention Baxandall presented ‘a model of how ‘the

experience of people in the past who made pictures can be replicated in the

6 Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, London, Faber and Faber 1958; new and

enlarged ed. 1968 cited



16

experience of people who explain them historically in the present. The

replication…involves re-enactment’. In explaining a picture ‘historically, we re-enact

something about it’. Baxandall proposed a ‘triangle of re-enactment’, consisting of

‘the terms of the problem’ confronted by picture makers (the ‘painter’s Brief’), the

‘culture in which they addressed the problem’, and ‘our description’ of the picture.

Davis stresses, however, (70) `that Baxandall ‘resisted’ re-enactment ‘from the

picture described by us in the present to the terms of its cultural production in the

past’: he was ‘cautious about re-enactment’. His concept of ‘the idiographic stance’

required that ‘we reconstruct the [historical] actor’s purposes on the basis of the

particular rather than general facts, even while clearly if implicitly using

generalizations, soft rather than hard ones, about human nature and so on’. One

‘might partly distinguish’ art history practiced thus from the models of the physical

and natural sciences, fields in which inquiry is characterized by ‘nomological’

concerns. Davis shows how Baxandall eventually ‘backed away’ from ‘the scope of

this distinction…when applied to art history’. ‘It turns out that the “historical

explanation of pictures” cannot do without the nomological inquiries at well-defined

stages in its procedure’. Davis’s approach to the issue is as follows:

I begin with historiographical considerations. In addition to its role in much

modern aesthetics and art criticism, re-enactment has occupied the

philosophy of history since Dilthey, notably in Gadamer’s hermeneutic

concept of the ‘fusion of horizons’. In this arena, Baxandall’s anti-

hermeneutic version was partly tailored to engage re-enactment as it had

been conceived both in a preceding special art-historical theory and in a

preceding theory of general history, namely Panofsky’s and Collingwood’s

respectively. Then I offer analytic considerations: what are the particular

components and claims of Baxandall’s triangle of re-enactment and its

idiographic stance? Finally, I pursue critical implications and consequences.

Baxandall’s early attraction to Panofsky’s essay ‘Art History as a Humanistic

Discipline’ has been well documented in the late interviews, and Panofsky’s

argument (Davis, 71) that the art historian ‘has to mentally re-enact the actions and

to re-create the creations’, an act of ‘intuitive aesthetic re-creation, including the

perception and appraisal of “quality”’, is familiar. Davis (72) is concerned to show

how Panofsky’s model is adjusted by Baxandall to ‘make the “meaning” of the art

work in the past “disappear” as the historian’s object. It is replaced by “historical

circumstances”…a compound of the “terms of [an artistic] problem” and the cultural

conditions of its solution’. Baxandall replaces Panofsky’s ‘”freely created” aesthetic

valuation’ ... with “pictures considered under descriptions”’. Davis argues (73),

however, that ‘we cannot use the whole of the description that we can produce to

retrieve the whole of the culture that produced the picture…’. He engages here with

Margaret Iverson and Stephen Melville regarding Baxandall’s linguistic means of

differentiating himself from Panofsky.7 He moves on to describe Baxandall’s

7 Margaret Iverson and Stephen Melville, eds, Writing Art History. Disciplinary Departures,

Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010: 26-37



17

‘distaste’ for ‘high iconography’, ‘painstaking decipherments of subtle humanist

themes or specialized theological symbolisms in …Renaissance pictures’,

interpreting this position as directed more at ‘latter-day Panofskyans and their

“overelaborate iconographies”’ than at Panofsky’s own argument of re-enactment.

This overlooks the fact that Baxandall must surely have recognized that

Gombrich, his thesis adviser, had, since the late 1930s, opposed Panofsky’s own

applications of his method to explaining the meanings of pictures, as well as actively

directing his students in his seminar at the Warburg, which Baxandall attended

during the 1960s, away from the ‘over-interpreting’ approaches of the latter-day

Panofskyans.8 Davis contrasts Baxandall’s work in Patterns of Intention, where ‘he

wanted to show that ‘Chardin’s culture was broadly “Lockean” – mediated to the

painter by French scientific middle-men’. Chardin need not have read Locke, as we

must do.

Davis offers (74-78) a detailed critique of Baxandall’s responses in Patterns of

Intention to R.G. Collingwood’s concept of history as re-enactment in his The Idea of

History (1946). Baxandall’s ‘resistance’ to Collingwood’s model of re-enactment (76-

7) began from his conviction that the latter’s ‘re-thinking’ ‘must be impossible for the

art historian in view of the special kind of thought that is art-thought’. In Patterns

Baxandall identifies ‘art-thought’ as the ‘maker’s style’. Davis argues that in Patterns

‘there is nothing but style – the dialectic of process’. In reviewing this problem (78),

Davis arrives at the position that ‘At its best, we might say, art history cannot but be

maximally distant from the thought that created its objects’. Going on to discuss the

‘analytic parameters of art-historical reconstruction’, according to Baxandall, Davis

sceptically reviews (78-9) Baxandall’s inference that in the artist’s ‘relinquishing’ the

work the ‘style-thought’ was ‘actually terminated in the past’, rendering re-

enactment ‘impossible in principle’; he interrogates Baxandall’s paradigm of ‘style-

thought’ being ‘rational’, with the implication that ‘we do not have to re-enact it at

all’; and questions the assumption that only ‘good pictures’ will enable historical

reconstruction. Davis concludes (80) that ‘style-thought could not be duplicated even

in its own time and place. As enactment without possibility of re-enactment, style-

thought has a history but no hermeneutics – an archaeology of survival, but no

theatre of reanimation’. He proceeds to examine (81) the ‘good picture – bad picture’

issue in relation to historical explanation and the means by which we can ‘discover

what a visual culture is’, noting ‘an undesirable consequence of Baxandall’s model’

being ‘the methodological circle enshrined in the triangle of re-enactment: in

explaining a picture we move toward understanding its visual culture even as we

depend on knowledge of it gained by explaining pictures’.

Davis shows (83) that Baxandall’s late work ‘increasingly turned to

nomologically organized inquiries in visual psychology in order to help reconstruct

pictures historically’, enabling what he calls ‘patterns of intention’ to be ‘enacted

again and again just because they are lawful and replicable, even if the pattern of

intention cannot be re-enacted because our evidence falls short’. Overall, Davis

subjects Baxandall’s arguments in Patterns, and their probable sources, to a

8 See Robert W. Gaston, "Erwin Panofsky and the Classical Tradition”, International Journal of

the Classical Tradition, 4, 4, 1998, 613-23



18

systematic critique that resonates with thoughtful, but not unsympathetic, reflection

on the problematics arising from virtually every element of Baxandall’s evolving

method.

Robert Williams, in his ‘Inferential Criticism and Kunstwissenschaft’ (91-106),

continues the critical approach to Baxandall’s method, turning first to his essay of

1979, ‘The Language of Art History’, where he engaged with some current varieties

of art historical method and ‘provides a drily pointed explanation of his own

concerns’.9 ‘The issues I most worry about in art history’, he wrote, ‘fall into two

main groups…One group is connected with the pretty gratuitous act of matching

language with the visual interest of works of art … The other… is connected with

how one can and cannot state the relationships between the character of works of art

and their historical circumstances’. The essay, Williams shows, is an sketch of the

‘inferential criticism’ that he would expound fully in Patterns of Intention. It is

‘inferential criticism’ that Williams distinguishes as Baxandall’s ‘principal

contribution to art historical method’. Williams confronts the characteristic nature of

Baxandall’s simultaneous refusal to declare himself a methodologist while openly

exploring aspects of theory, and his apparent evasiveness regarding probable

intellectual influence in his publications, while admitting to certain connections in

late interviews. Williams notes (92) that he consistently expressed doubts about ‘the

academicizing-up of the discipline’, and yet ‘his approach was carefully meditated

and profoundly original, a contribution to Kunstwissenschaft while also a critique of

it, and it may still serve as a point of departure for productive reflection upon the

essential challenges of our field’.

Williams rightly judges that Baxandall’s preoccupation with language in

historical method arises in his earliest publications, where he diverges sharply from

the Warburg and Panofsky tradition of using ‘literary sources to enhance their

understanding and interpretation of images, by matching content in both text and

image’. Baxandall’s ‘innovative force’ lay in ‘the sheer perversity of undertaking an

art-historical inquiry not by direct engagement with the works themselves, but

indirectly, through the language used by period writers’. It surely, as he himself

stated, constituted an attack on the ‘Courtauld’ tradition of connoisseurship, but,

more importantly, as Williams notes, ‘defamiliarize[d] the works we take for

granted, to force us to reckon with a complex world structured by mental habits

unlike our own. On a deeper level…it also undermines our confidence in any

assumptions that we, as art historians, may make about pictures based on our direct

experience of them. Period language does not necessarily offer a more accurate or

satisfactory account of the objects, but it does expose the limitations of our own

terms and categories.’ Baxandall thus sought (94) “a new, more self-conscious, more

critically circumspect strategy for the historical interpretation of images.’ A crucial

assumption of his, already evident in Giotto and the Orators, and continued in Patterns

of Intention, was that ‘language is not just the essential medium through which the

results of art-historical inquiry are communicated; it is also an essential object of

such inquiry’. Williams uses the late interviews to describe how Baxandall

developed his early positions on linguistic relativism, and probes (93-4) his playful

9 Michael Baxandall, ‘The Language of Art History’, New Literary History, 11 (1979) 453-65



19

reluctance to acknowledge the patent influence of Wittgenstein’s critical

terminology, from his Cambridge period, and later. Williams argues that the

‘Language’ article established Baxandall’s view that ‘Words inferential as to cause

are the main vehicle of demonstrative precision in art criticism’, a plank in the

formation of his theory of inferential criticism. Offering a striking re-evaluation of an

aspect of Baxandall’s method that infuriated critics, Williams argues that Baxandall’s

‘strategic indirectness’, ‘the ‘provisional, empirical – sub-theoretical – nature of his

approach’ is ‘even more fundamental to his method than the emphasis on language’.

He aspires ‘to a kind of procedural rigor and purity’, rendering him ‘the

Wittgenstein of art history’.

Williams’ sub-section ‘Society’ (95-6) explores the novelty of the ‘period eye’

in Painting and Experience, where his approach to language’s role facilitates his

spectacular extension of retrievable sources that went significantly ‘beyond the

emphasis of then recent work on patronage by scholars such as Francis Haskell and

D.S. Chambers ‘to explore ‘more pervasive and deeply embedded assumptions,

values, and practices that structure culture’. The mixed reception of the book (by art

historians, mainly) and Baxandall’s responses in 1979 are explored (95). Williams

then comments (96-7) on Baxandall’s second selected piece, the essay ‘Art, Society,

and the Bouguer Principle’ (1985),10 where Baxandall gives a self-revealing, but also

strategically methodological, account of a projected but unpublished study of

Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s frescoes in Siena, where a ‘social history’ approach would

have failed, given the ‘terribly simple fact’ that art and society are ‘analytical

concepts from two different kinds of categorization of human experience’. He turned

to a new term, ‘pictorialization’, ‘the deployment of the resources of the

medium…not just the bare registration of a subject matter’. And, as Williams

records, he later spoke of his lack of ‘sympathy’ for the theoretical relativism of New

Historicism, in a statement that sounds startlingly like a positivist manifesto: ’I think

of myself as trying to find out what really happened’.

Finally, Williams explores Baxandall’s developing notions of visuality (97-

100), especially his late, ‘virtuoso’ ‘attempt to recover those aspects of “the visual”

that had seemed to lie beyond the reach of language’. The Tiepolo book (1994) is

described as ‘a sustained effort to address “the absolutely pictorial”, while Shadows

(1995) concentrating on optical theory and rather narrow-based study of a picture by

Chardin, eliciting Williams’s concern that here Baxandall’s approach, ‘with its

“obsessional” interest in shadows, has not begun to yield diminishing returns’.

Williams similarly takes issue with Baxandall’s essay on Piero’s Resurrection in Words

for Pictures (2003), spotting repetition from his 1994 essay on Braque, and perhaps

‘projecting an interpretation onto the images that has more to do with his own

visual habits and preoccupations than the objective importance of the feature in

question…’. Baxandall ran the risk, Williams comments, of succumbing, in insisting

that ‘the primary interest of the visual arts lies in their specifically visual properties’,

to ‘an old-fashioned form of modernism’. In a thoughtful summary Williams

ponders that ‘tactical indirectness’ of Baxandall’s scholarship, a history of successive

‘virtuoso performances’, of self-distancing from current theory.

10 Michael Baxandall, ‘Art, Society, and the Bouguer Principle’, Representations, 3 (1985): 33-42.



20

Williams is surely correct in recognizing the kinship of Gombrich and

Baxandall in their mutual and separate efforts to ‘ground the discussion of art’ in

diverse, and ultimately disputable ways. One might have added that Gombrich’s

assertion in Art and Illusion that ‘it is precisely because all art is “conceptual” that all

representations are recognizable by their style’, probably had a measurable influence

in temporarily satisfying Baxandall’s relentless search for concepts.11 And Williams

interjects a stimulating idea of his own, that those who have reservations about

Baxandall’s fascination with the ‘absolutely pictorial’ might yet ‘be able to see them

as grounded in a recognition of the fact that the technical challenges faced by artists

were an important part of their work, that it is not the intrinsic visuality of pictures

that grounds their interest but the work – the human labour – that the resulting

product makes visible’. He leaves the reader with the thought that Baxandall’s

‘inferential criticism’ attempted to deal with ‘the groundlessness of art history as a

form of knowledge’: ‘As long as that groundlessness continues to concern us, we are

likely to keep re-reading Baxandall’.

Paul Hills, in ‘The Presence of Light’(107-15), take us initially into

Baxandall’s Episodes and A Grasp of Kaspar in search of illuminating passages in

which he recalls and retrieves his subtle and deeply personal responses to light and

its myriad effects, from the privacy of his childhood bedroom to his postgraduate

travels, and eventually, in his publications. Hills cautions the reader not to assume

that the late Tiepolo and Shadows books signalled a new attentiveness to light. He

directs us (108-09) to consider Baxandall’s intimate curatorial experience with

sculpture in the 1960s as a bridge to his work on shadows, sheen, and textures in the

Limewood Sculptors of 1980. Hills offers many typically sensitive observations on the

complexity of Baxandall’s responses to light on the German works in situ.

Hills devotes the second half of the essay to three paintings executed

between about 1470 and 1530, offering readings of the artists’ ‘engagement’ with

light and shadow, works for which Baxandall’s ‘discriminations have shaped my

response’. This was (111) ‘a period when light and shadow exercised pictorial

intelligence in a manner that would shape the distinctive visual grammar of later

European art’. The ‘attention given to both monochrome and polychrome forms of

depiction and …the interplay between them’, is explored through Baxandall’s

analysis in Limewood Sculptors, and the rise of engraving ‘as a self-sufficient artistic

medium’ is seen as sharpening a new awareness of modelling’. Antonello of

Messina’s Virgin Annunciate provides Hills with a fine example of the ‘interruption’

of light falling on the Virgin’s hand, cloak and face. His detailed account of this

picture, Giorgione’s La Vecchia, and Titian’s Supper at Emmaus, are too complex to

summarize here, and are as subtle and richly informative of the trajectories,

‘manipulations’, and transformative powers of pictorial lighting as we are used to

reading in his other publications. The contact points with Baxandall’s work are

telling, but not numerous. This is a reflective essay that contributes to the collection

in a different way, gently referring here and there to the presence of Baxandall’s

ideas through his Limewood Sculptors, Patterns of Intention, and Words for Pictures. It

11 E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, London:

Phaidon, 1960, 76.



21

conjures something like the meditative visual process Baxandall himself might have

used in relating a series of images to a specific theme of representation.

Evelyn Lincoln’s chapter, ‘Printing and Experience in Eighteenth-Century

Italy’ (117-40), arises from the personal experience of Baxandall’s teaching at

Berkeley. Lincoln writes: ‘Studying with him was conversational and dialogic, with

teaching understood in the sense of showing, rather than telling, of providing

conditions in which observations could be raised, and information could travel

freely. Most importantly he taught how to ask illuminating questions’. A detailed

account is given of Baxandall’s teaching of a fourteen-week lecture course, with

Lincoln’s assistance, a course notable for the ‘singular brevity’ of its syllabus,

recording his use of Alberti’s De pictura, Hartt’s Italian Renaissance Art for ‘factual

information and illustrations, and Painting and Experience. The first assignment, a ‘3-

page essay about what knowledge about [the] circumstances, function, or techniques

of making, might or might not be useful in the understanding and perception of’ a

selected object in the University Art Museum, is significant for its brevity and strong

theoretical focus. One believes Lincoln’s comment (119) that when Baxandall told

students that ‘responses to art in the form of questions to ask were important

enough to constitute a formally written essay’ these proved ‘extremely useful for the

development of the students and very difficult to mark’. The lecture programme

reveals how Baxandall gave nuance to his core text of 1972, with its emphasis on

workshops, pictorial skills, contemporary vocabulary, and so on, importing new

terms ‘from our own time but not our own discipline, using words like “induction”,

and “constancy”, … terms Baxandall had borrowed from scientists working in

psychology of vision…’.

Lincoln devotes the remainder of her text (123-38) to ‘a particularly daunting

and impenetrable-seeming example’ that arose in a class on early modern festival

and carnival that would culminate in an exhibition of prints and festival books. The

etchings were produced annually between 1722 and 1785 for ‘a solemn festival that

also had some carnivalesque qualities, called the Chinea’. The students studied the

prints in Baxandallian mode, beginning with the question ‘what it was that people

saw in them, given the visual paradox that they seemed to represent little that was

visually relevant to ‘fiery spectacle of impressive sounds and destruction’? Lincoln

offers a stimulating discussion of how one’s art-historical expectations regarding the

content and nature of festival prints had to be re-thought, give that the prints

‘fail[ed] to record’ the requisite ‘sensory experiences’, in contrast with other literary

and visual forms of commemoration. She concludes (132) that ‘The overt flatfooted

fakeness of the Chinea prints signals the conflation of the real and the false on

several registers, something that was remarked on as a source of pleasure for

viewers’. Thus, if they were ‘lacking as documents of the festival experience, they

are interesting documents of viewing experiences: both of stage sets, in public, and

of prints, in more private settings’. Utilizing insights in Patterns of Intention, Lincoln

concludes (137) that the curiously dull prints are ‘not only representations of an act

of perception…or, in this case, willed misperception, but a machine in themselves for

re-mobilizing that kind of perception in viewers.’

Peter Mack’s chapter entitled ‘Pattern and Individual: Limewood Sculptors and

A Grasp of Kaspar’ (141-56), begins with the proposition that Baxandall was



22

‘primarily a writer’. When he left Cambridge he ‘hoped to write novels’, and

completed Kaspar in 2005, but his career was as a writer and teacher of art history

and theory. Mack explores, taking Limewood Sculptors as ‘perhaps his most

distinguished work’ in art history, ‘some ways in which Kaspar reworks and builds

on ideas expressed in Limewood Sculptors’, and ‘what Kaspar adds, what fiction

permits Baxandall to write about which he could not express in art historical

scholarship’. Mack begins with a detailed account of Limewood Sculptors, which I

cannot reproduce here. He focuses (141-43) on the broader aims, ‘to understand the

larger social, commercial, and religious structures and functions governing the

trade…He tried to develop a historical sense of the sculptures which could also

respond to the subjectivity of both the artist and the modern viewer’. Mack notes

Baxandall’s characteristic use of lists and categories; his strong ‘sense of place’ and

diverse civic contexts; the ‘extraordinarily rich ostensive descriptions of particular

sculptures’; his ‘picture of the constraints operating on the artists’, and the

materiality of the woodworking process. Beyond that, Baxandall investigates

individual style and ‘the tension between developing’ one and ‘making expressive

choices’ within national styles, while artists observed decorum in sculpting the

female body.

Mack then turns to Kaspar (144), suggesting that the novel ‘shares many of

the preoccupations of Limewood Sculptors.’ ‘Above all’, he writes, ‘characters in the

book offer us schemas for understanding the behaviour of other characters, most

often, but not only, the absent Kaspar, whom Briggs [Baxandall fictionalized as an

economic historian] and the reader are attempting to grasp’. Mack perceives that

Baxandall’s account of a discussion between his characters Briggs and his academic

friend Klaus regarding personality types and suitability for relationships, entailing a

relation between ‘excitement’ and ‘repose’ that is ‘mathematically expressed’ and

rejected by Briggs as ‘far too schematic (and also too simple)’ can profitably be

juxtaposed with ‘Baxandall’s exposition of the location of individual sculptors in

relation to the ‘relaxed stability’ and ‘flaunted stress’ of limewood sculpture ‘in the

Florid Style’. Another point of contact is identified (144-5) in an episode where ‘the

Gramscian Pasquale gives Briggs a lesson in the limitations of using general patterns

of social life’. Kaspar, we are told, also ‘resembles’ the sculpture book in having ‘ a

long and very Baxandallian passage on alpine paths, the production of cloth, and the

technology of weaving to a pattern’, and ‘passages of detailed visual description of

landscapes, paintings, and a wooden sculpture of St. Roche’ and ‘short disquisitions’

on geology, and so forth. Mack identifies (146) strong points of contact in Kaspar

passages dealing with ‘geography, trade, and social history’, ‘old maps and trade-

route’, ‘transfers of money’, and visual responses to ‘different types of light’, with

details in Shadow and Enlightenment. Descriptions of Kaspar’s paintings (147) are said

to ‘provide important clues about Kaspar’ during 1944. These are two puzzling

compositions, one of an Italian town view, the other of an Italian bridge, and

Baxandall’s character’s perform ‘ekphrasis’ (using Mack’s term) on these as a way

into ‘the state of Kaspar’s mind’. The character Don Ivo quotes Kaspar on the

material nature of painting: ‘It is mostly flax, you know…When painting, one is

playing with flax. Heterogeneous but mainly mineral dye-stuffs are suspended in

the oil of flax seeds: linseed. That is what paints are…And the fibre of flax stalks is



23

spun…then bleached and plain-woven. That is the canvas. One smears the first on

the second.’ Mack notes (148) the ‘less appreciative wonder and more of a witty

sense of futility’ in these words than in Baxandall’s ‘attention to materiality’ in

Limewood Sculptors. Mack adduces further examples of the transmission of ideas

between the two books, culminating (150) in the significant question, ‘what…does

the fiction of …Kaspar allow Baxandall to talk about which the virtuoso art history of

Limewood Sculptors did not permit’? He concludes (150) that fiction ‘allows him to be

more open in providing the pleasure which readers take from fine description,

elegant narrative, and beautiful and far-reaching argument.’

Mack’s example from Kaspar of the book’s ‘combination of description and

thinking’ (151) is given a penetrating exegesis, and as one would expect from an

expert on Renaissance rhetoric. Mack isolates the ‘comparisons’, similes in fact, as

producing more ‘pleasure’ for the reader than Baxandall permitted himself in his art

history writing. Mack seems to be exercising Baxandallian restraint in eschewing a

technical rhetorical analysis of the reduction or suppression of pleasure-inducing,

persuasive ekphrasis in Baxandall’s work. One hopes he will return to this topic.

Mack argues that the fiction mode ‘allows the writer to scatter fragments of teaching,

reflection, and erudition across the work, giving accidental pleasure to the reader’,

freeing the writer from the argumentational strictures of academic writing. Fiction

permits (152) the intrusion of ‘moral judgement of human actions’, and

‘demonstrations of the deceptiveness of knowledge and interpretation’ (153). Mack

closes with a quotation from one of Baxandall’s last letters to him, expressing the

‘difficulty of getting the balance between “rhetoric and dialectic as pervasively

conditioning and enabling, and rhetoric and dialectic as plastic and adaptable; it’s so

difficult to avoid the impression of schematic rigour”’. One senses in Mack’s piece

the scholarly and literary challenge posed by Baxandall as a teacher and friend, and

as an author writing in diverse media whose work demanded explication in terms

that Baxandall himself might well have resisted.

The final chapter is Elizabeth Cook’s ‘Michael Baxandall’s “Stationing”’ (157-

69), which draws the reader initially into a personal meditation on how Keats’s term

‘Stationing or statuary’, denoting Milton’s more rhetorical forms of ‘simple

description’ that augmented a sense of ‘situation in space’, would have pleased

Baxandall, given that he delighted in Hobbes’s idiosyncratic meaning of the Latin

‘conatus’ [struggle attempt, impulse, in classical Latin], interpreted as ‘instantaneous

motion through minimal space’. ‘It was’, she says, ‘gladly adopted as a useful,

practical, and current term to denote a process we were jointly exploring [when she

was at the Warburg as a doctoral student] to indicate swift, intuitive grasp…The

adjective “conative” was coined to describe the rapid leaps of association’. Cook

focuses on Baxandall’s posthumous Episodes and A Grasp of Kaspar, suggesting,

however, that ‘the impulse to station – to give an account of spatial situation and

space- … runs through the work for which he is …better known’. She selects

Baxandall’s recollection in Episodes that while working at the V&A, having decided

to study the group of ‘late-gothic and renaissance south-German sculptures, he

‘could have Veit Stoss’s boxwood Virgin and Child on my desk while I worked on it.

It was a perfect position for getting a grasp of a new field’. Cook takes this sentence

as the ‘crux of the paragraph’, ‘a passage that anchors the paragraph in the solidity



24

of the figures, a solidity that extends almost by sleight of hand, to “while I worked

on it”, and “ a perfect position for getting a grasp on a new field”’. Cook writes (159):

‘However, I cannot imagine that Baxandall handled the Veit Stoss piece very much

when he worked on it. Rather, that it sat upon his desk, being given space and

occupying that space. The attention that would have been paid to it would have

avoided any taint of intrusion. It required a way of mapping without interference’. I

wonder, though, given Baxandall’s stating that he was drawn to Wölfflin’s Classic

Art in the 1950s, that he had probably contemplated at the Warburg Franz

Landsberger’s little book, Heinrich Wölfflin (1924),12 with its photograph facing the

title page showing an exquisitely-posed Wölfflin, seated, holding with rapt attention

in both hands a small Quattrocento devotional painting and resting it on a small

table upon which stands a classicizing fragmentary statuette of a Venus, flanked by

flowers and a book. The physical, ocular and mental attention of the scholarly art

historian to tangible objets d’art has rarely been more powerfully represented, and its

potency in a biographical sketch may have been suggestive. It was of a type, but one

potentially influential.

Cook offers subtle observations based on Episodes about Baxandall’s student

reading habits, the feel of books frequently handled, tying this to comments

regarding ‘what shaping pressures have been at work in producing the memory-like

objects and events I have in my mind’. She excavates (160) Baxandall’s references to

feelings of being ‘too actively directive’ in giving advice to a friend, of being

‘invaded’ in one’s personal working space, of having one’s things touched, causing

irritation. His close observation of human gesture and intellectual inwardness as

applied to someone whom he deeply admired at the Warburg, Gertrud Bing, is

cleverly excerpted here:’[Bing] could convey a quite subtle qualifying view of what

one had just said by the timing and pace with which her hand moved the cigarette to

her mouth, her face expressionless and unchanging’. Cook observes (152) that ‘Much

of Kaspar is concerned with correcting the vision that is seen through distorting

lenses’, and ‘a continual revision of grasp’. Her judicious selection of topics from

Episodes and Kaspar are gently suggestive of her own grasp of Baxandall’s ever-so-

particular mental and social attitudes, such as had a bearing on the preoccupations

of his teaching and published research. Her endnotes warrant careful reading in the

latter respect.

This slim book is the most important collection published to date on

Baxandall. Its ‘insider’s’ view, combined with extensive critical use of the late

interviews, affords an intimate and searching intellectual portrait of this complex

man. There are more aspects of the Warburg Institute context worthy of exploration,

of course. For example the significance of the editorial dominance of J.B. Trapp.

Trapp, Institute Librarian and then Director, operated for decades (1953-1990) as an

arbiter of style in the Institute’s publications, enticing a lapidary, always elegant

economy of prose from authors, Baxandall among them (Trapp ‘chastened’ his style:

Giotto and the Orators, viii), a style that held clear intellectual implications in its

fastidious handling of language, some of which are evident in the present book.

Then there is the question of Gombrich’s potential influence on Baxandall’s

12 Franz Landsberger, Heinrich Wölfflin, Berlin: Elena Gottschalk, 1924.



25

reluctance to engage with ‘method’. Gombrich’s privately expressed scathing

contempt, in the late 1960s, for text books on art historical method such as Hans

Tietze’s (1880-1954) published in 1913 (Die Methode der Kunstgeschichte: ein Versuch,

Leipzig: Seemann), has to be balanced with the admiration that both he and Otto

Kurz patently shared for Tietze as their teacher in Vienna. Thus, as Gombrich

himself approached issues of method from around 1950 onward, he was

transmitting simultaneously a profound scepticism about existing versions of the

practice, a similarly conflicted posture that we encounter in Baxandall, even if the

scholars differed greatly in intellectual background and responses to art. These are

just two aspects of ‘deep structure’ at the Warburg that one hopes will be explored

further.

Robert W. Gaston – Gained his Ph.D. under Otto Kurz at the Warburg Institute,

1967-1969. A former Fellow and Visiting Professor at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti and

Kress Senior Fellow at CASVA. Currently Principal Fellow in Art History,

University of Melbourne. He specializes in Italian art 1300-1600. His latest book,

Pirro Ligorio, Libro dei Fiumi e dei Fonti antichi: Napoli. Biblioteca Nazionale, codice B.9

(Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Pirro Ligorio) Rome: De Luca, appeared in 2015.

[email protected]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-

NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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